


the light fails and the fog rolls in

by draculard



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Alec Hardy Needs A Hug, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Panic Attacks, Pre-Relationship, set in series one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-28 14:31:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19814257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Of course it's Miller who finds him crying on the office floor.





	the light fails and the fog rolls in

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Margaret Atwood's "A Sad Child."
> 
> -Hardy's such a great character for hurt/comfort and whump, but it's hard to find any hurt/comfort fics that focus on him. Unfortunately this means I have to write it myself and subject all of you poor AO3 denizens to my work.  
> -I can't remember which episode it is where Hardy cries in the office, nor can I remember why everyone else had left (were they just done for the day? Were they celebrating something? Idk) so I decided they all went to the pub and you'll just have to deal with that :3

It’s just like her to leave her keys at the office.

She hadn’t thought twice of going to the pub with everyone after work (well, everyone but Hardy). Henderson had offered her a ride, so she hadn’t even noticed the missing keys until she was starting her second beer — and now here she was, walking back across the office parking lot with nothing but the moon to see by, dreadfully sober as Henderson’s wee sedan takes off down the road without her.

She hopes to Christ Hardy’s not still in the building — ah, but there’s his car, tucked away in his marked parking spot. She’d noticed it there her first day back from Florida and thought, _Wonder who drives that, poor thing. Can’t wait to have a go at them for parking in my spot._

For a horrible moment, Ellie wonders if Hardy has locked the doors to keep the needy citizens of Broadchurch from wandering in with complaints. But the glass door to the police station gives easily under her hands, and she breathes a sigh of relief as she steps into the hallway. At least _one_ thing has gone right today.

She pushes the office door open with her shoulder and pauses a moment to fumble for the lights. There’s a light on in Hardy’s office, which only serves to blind her after her dark walk through the lot, but Hardy himself is nowhere to be seen. Frowning, Ellie finally finds the lightswitch and flicks them on, blinking in the sudden fluorescent daylight that fills the room.

“You in here, sir?” she calls, and simultaneously hears something, almost buried by her voice, that sounds like a sniffle. Ellie approaches her desk warily, eyes darting ‘round the office as she searches the cluttered surface for her keys. She doesn’t see Hardy anywhere, but she hears a low, barely-audible sound that may be a quick, choked-off breath.

“Sir?” says Ellie again, uncertainly now. Her fingers close around the keys and she puts them into her pocket absentmindedly, her mission — get home, talk to Tom, catch some much-needed sleep — suddenly forgotten. She glances around the room, at Hardy’s empty office, at the paper-strewn desks of her coworkers, at the map of Broadchurch on the west wall—

At the shaking man huddled underneath it. 

“Hardy?”

Her voice, now, is little more than a whisper. She doesn’t want Hardy to hear her. She wants him to continue whatever he’s doing (crying? Having a panic attack? A nervous breakdown?) obliviously; she wants to walk back out the door and go home with Hardy none the wiser, so she can forget this ever happened and he can live his life without knowing she saw him here.

But he looks up at her whisper, covering his face as he does so that all Ellie can see is one wide, dark eye.

And yes, he’s crying.

And yes, Ellie wishes she’d kept her fat gob shut. She feels her cheeks burning in sympathetic embarrassment for Hardy, awkwardly gestures back toward the door with her keys.

“I can — I can go,” she says. It comes out sounding like a question, and Hardy only stares at her a little longer with that blank, dilated eye before he buries his face in his knees again. Ellie tells herself she can’t see his shoulders shaking.

How long, exactly, has he been crying on the office floor? Since she and the others left for the pub?

Has he been holding back a breakdown all day?

“Sir,” she whispers, crouching on the floor nearby, so she and Hardy are level. God, it feels awkward to call him ‘sir’ right now, but it would be even more awkward to call him anything else. “Sir, do you … do you need anything?”

Her only answer is a soft, stifled sob. Hardy’s hands tighten on his knees, the knuckles turning white. Hesitantly, Ellie shuffles closer to him on her knees, moving slowly, the way she would approach a wounded animal.

Actually, she _wouldn’t_ approach a wounded animal if given the chance. And instinct tells her she probably shouldn’t be approaching Hardy, either. She does it anyway, shifting position until she’s sitting next to him with her back against the wall, her shoulder touching his. She can feel him trembling against her even as he flinches away.

And then, unexpectedly, leans into her. 

Ellie sits there silently, listening to the barely-audible, choked gasps wrenching their way from Hardy’s throat. He’s uncomfortably cold — must have been sitting on the floor for a long time, possibly shivering from the chill as much as from his tears — but it takes all her courage to put her arm around Hardy and pull him closer. He collapses against her obediently, his trembling intensifying.

“Shh,” says Ellie. She can’t reach Hardy’s back without breaking the embrace, so she rubs a broad circle across his ribs instead. He flinches again. “Shh. It’s okay.”

It’s what she says to Tom when he has a nightmare. She makes a concentrated effort not to tell anyone, _don’t cry,_ but that’s what she desperately wishes to say to Hardy. She’d give anything to forget tonight, to reverse time and turn Hardy back into her scowling, angry, bastard of a boss again. 

She doesn’t want to see him like this. She keeps her eyes on the desk before her, pretends the man crying beside her is Joe (though she’s never seen Joe cry like this, not even when his mum died), or Tom after a nightmare, or anybody else. 

Pretends there are no tears in _her_ eyes, either. Because there shouldn’t be. She doesn’t even know why _Hardy_ is crying, much less why she should be. So she blinks the tears away and squeezes Hardy’s arm, pulling him closer to her.

In time — just as the cold is starting to seep into her through the floor — Hardy’s trembling subsides and he leans away from Ellie, not quite shrugging off her arm. He raises his head a little, wiping his eyes on his sleeve like a child would. 

“Well,” says Ellie, her own voice a little shakier than she would like it to be, “if you wanted to go with us to the pub so badly, you might have said so sooner.”

Hardy lets out a congested groan which Ellie suspects may signify exasperation.

“Sorry,” she says, nudging his shoulder and trying on a little smile. It’s a bit shaky, too, but he doesn’t look up in time to see it, so it doesn’t matter. “Are you alright, then?”

“I’m never alright,” says Hardy, his voice little more than a rasp.

It’s meant to be a joke, Ellie knows, but it’s hard to take it as one. Her smile fades away completely as she watches him dry his eyes and wipe the tear tracks off his face. He does it with such a glazed, mechanical look that she’s suddenly certain he’s done this a thousand times before.

Quickly — perhaps unwisely — she pulls Hardy into a proper hug. He stiffens against her, recoiling automatically from any display of affection. Even when he relaxes, it’s only minutely, and he remains awkwardly tense in Ellie’s arms.

She pats his back anyway, stubbornly ignoring the fact that he’s already trying to extricate himself from her grasp. 

“Christ, but you’re skinny,” Ellie mutters, finally letting him go. “It’s like hugging a twig.”

Hardy says nothing; his cheeks are still flushed from the crying jag, his eyes fixed to the floor. Ellie’s nerves are so wrought that she just knows she’s going to start babbling any moment now to fill the silence, but before she can start, Hardy says,

“Why’d you come back?”

And his voice is so soft and unguarded that Ellie’s typical bustling energy fades away.

“Forgot my keys,” she says, matching his tone. She holds them up so he can see — three keys dangling from a little fob Tom made in nursery. She’s struck by how tired he looks as he squints at them; he’s practically swaying on his feet, his hair in disarray, his eyes shadowed. 

“The keys,” says Hardy quietly. “Right.”

Somehow, she feels the answer disappoints him. He turns away from her and stands still a moment, looking lost — then he strides, with exhausted purpose, back to his office. 

Back to work.

“ _Hardy,_ ” Ellie says — well, groans. He glances up at her almost dismissively, as if he hasn’t just cried on her shoulder, and makes a big show of rifling through the paperwork on his desk, already absorbed in the case. She can see his eyebrows twitching as he tries desperately to keep his face blank. 

“Go home, Miller,” he murmurs. “It’s late.”

She stays where she is, wavering uncertainly. It feels like there’s a magnet in her chest, right above her heart, that’s pulling her inexorably toward Hardy — a voice in her ear whispering that she should stay, that she needs to stay, to make sure he’s really alright, to keep him company if he isn’t. 

But Joe and Tom are at home. She glances at the door, biting her lip, and when she looks back at Hardy, he’s all closed-off again, his face a perfect mask.

Her scowling, angry bastard.

Just like she wanted.

“Take care of yourself, sir,” Ellie says. If Hardy hears her, he doesn’t acknowledge it.

He keeps his eyes on his papers even as Ellie leaves.


End file.
